Tag Archives: raid

Michael Cohen’s lawyer discussed the possibility of Donald Trump’s former “fixer” receiving a pardon during a meeting with the president’s legal team, according to a new report. Stephen Ryan held conversations on behalf of Cohen with Rudy Giuliani, Jay Sekulow and Joanna Hendon that are now the subject of Congressional investigations, the Wall Street Journal reported.

* Freelancer Cody Weddle out of contact since 8am, reports say * Univision anchor Jorge Ramos and crew detained last weekCody Weddle is the latest in a string of foreign journalists to be detained in Venezuela. Photograph: Fernando Vergara/APAuthorities in Venezuela have reportedly arrested a US freelance journalist after an early morning raid on his Caracas home by the country’s feared military counter-intelligence agency.Cody Weddle, who freelances for the Miami Herald, the Daily Telegraph and ABC News, has been out of contact since 8am when the raid took place and his equipment was confiscated, according to a press workers’ union in Venezuela.Weddle’s assistant Carlos Camacho, a Venezuelan national, was also detained after a raid on his home by the same counter-intelligence agency on Wednesday morning, reported the union, who catalogued 36 cases of journalists held this year.Weddle is the latest in a string of foreign journalists to be detained in Venezuela. Last week Univision anchor Jorge Ramos and his crew were held while interviewing the country’s embattled president, Nicolás Maduro. They were released and deported shortly afterwards, while their equipment – including the recordings of the curtailed interview – were kept by authorities.“The Maduro regime, desperate, is doing the only thing it knows to do: repress and censor,” tweeted José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch.Maduro, who is fending off mounting international pressure to cede power to the opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó, detained two French journalists in January who were filming outside the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas. Numerous local journalists have been harassed in recent years.Sign up for the US morning briefingFlorida senator Marco Rubio, long one of Maduro’s fiercest critics on the international stage, joined the chorus expressing outrage over Weddle’s detention on Wednesday morning. “US citizen & journalist Cody Weddle is missing in Venezuela and apparently arrested by the Maduro regime this morning,” he tweeted.The move against Weddle worried several Venezuela analysts, who see little logic to Maduro’s authoritarian attacks against individual journalists.“If [Weddle’s detention is] true, this is extremely problematic and a very dangerous move for the Maduro government to make,” Eva Golinger, a former adviser to Maduro’s late predecessor Hugo Chávez, tweeted. “Trump is waiting for any excuse to intervene,” she went on to say, in reference to the persistent threats leveled by the White House since it threw its weight behind Maduro’s ouster in late January.Phil Gunson, a consultant with Crisis Group in Venezuela, seconded that concern. “Given the current state of relations between the US and Venezuela, having military intelligence arrest a US citizen, freelance reporter Cody Weddle, seems like unnecessary provocation,” he tweeted. “Who thought that would be a good idea?”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said Wednesday that he wants a briefing from the FBI on the tactics it used last week when agents arrested President Donald Trump's confidant Roger Stone as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip arrested five men Saturday over a raid at the Palestinian Authority’s media headquarters, in which valuable equipment was destroyed. Five armed men attacked the offices of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation in Gaza City on Friday, trashing equipment worth thousands of dollars. The media centre is funded by the West Bank-based Palestinian government and houses Palestine TV and the Voice of Palestine radio station.

A fourth victim of the Strasbourg Christmas market attack died from his wounds yesterday as investigators searched for possible accomplices of the gunman slain after two days of terror. The prime suspect, Cherif Chekatt, 29, was killed on Thursday after he opened fire on three officers who crossed his path by chance while on patrol. Authorities had received two tip-offs about his general whereabouts. The fourth victim of the knife and gun attack in central Strasbourg, eastern France, was 28-year old Italian radio journalist Antonio Megalizzi. He had been shot in the head and had been in a coma. Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister, said the whole country was united by “sadness and pain”. French interior minister Christophe Castaner was in Strasbourg to reopen the Christmas market Credit: SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP Yesterday, Christophe Castaner, France’s interior minister, attended the reopening of Strasbourg's Christmas market, which welcomes two million people every year and had been shut since Tuesday night’s attack. To reopen swiftly, he said, was vital "for the honour of Strasbourg, for the honour of France”. President Emmanuel Macron was due to attend later in the evening. Islamic State claimed Chekatt as one of its “soldiers” but Mr Castaner dismissed the claim as “totally opportunistic". Chekatt had 27 previous convictions for theft and violence and his Islamic beliefs were radicalised during previous periods in prison. Police were still holding seven people yesterday for questing, including his parents, in a bid to establish whether he was helped by accomplices while on the run. “We want to reconstruct the past 48 hours in order to find out whether he got some support," said Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz. Three police officers on patrol shot dead prime suspect Cherif Chekatt in a suburb of Strasbourg on Tuesday night after he opened fire Credit: UGC Relief in Strasbourg came as France braces for a fifth straight Saturday of violent protests linked to the “yellow vest” movement against high taxes and low purchasing power. Mr Castaner urged protesters not to test exhausted security forces with the type of riots seen in Paris and Bordeaux over the last two weekends. "I can't stand the idea that today people applaud police forces and that tomorrow some people will think it makes sense to throw stones at us," he said after meeting officers. With the movement apparently losing steam after concessions by Emmanuel Macron, the French president said France needed “calm, order and to return to a normal way of working". Michel Delpuech, Paris’ police chief, said some 8,000 officers and 14 armoured vehicles would be deployed in Paris as last week with the focus on preventing vandals from wreaking fresh destruction. In an act of defiance, attractions such as the Louvre museum and Opera Garnier will be open this weekend, unlike last Saturday. The protests have hit the economy, with output in the last quarter of the year set to be half initial projections, while Macron's concessions are likely to push the budget deficit above an EU agreed limit.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — The small town of Abassan in the Gaza Strip is a tough place to infiltrate — everyone knows everyone else and outsiders passing through quickly attract attention. So when strangers drove through town, suspicious Hamas security men stopped the van and questioned those inside.

Israeli soldiers raided the official Palestinian news agency on Monday in the occupied West Bank, a day after suspected Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israelis outside a nearby Jewish settlement. Wafa, the Palestinian Authority news service, said on its website that troops entered the server room and went through recordings at its main office in West Bank city of Ramallah. “They withdrew from the agency’s office after they took copies of the security camera footage,” it said.

Hamas published photos on Thursday of six men and two women who it said were involved in a botched Israeli undercover raid into the Gaza Strip this month and appealed for details about them. Israel’s military censor, without commenting on the credibility of Hamas’s information, urged the media not to disseminate any details about the Nov. 11 incident in which an Israeli colonel, a Hamas commander and six other Palestinian militants were killed. Israel has not released the name of the dead Israeli officer, citing security considerations, and has not commented on the purpose of the undercover mission that Hamas said it interrupted when its men challenged a civilian vehicle.

The flareup cast a new cloud over efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations to broker a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the dominant armed group in Gaza. On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he hoped to reach an “arrangement” that would avoid another conflict and ease Israeli-blockaded Gaza’s economic hardships. In southern Israel, interceptor missiles streaked through the sky and sirens sounded during what the military said were more than 80 rocket salvoes from Gaza.